Becoming a non-custodial single parent with assitance from the government!

August 22, 2008

Awww, the wonderful world of government assistance programs designed to build and assist families. Don’t we all just love them?! After all who in all reality should have the the right to be able to afford to see their children? Should you? Should I? What about them over there? All to often this seems to be the case. Child support payments usually work like most pay grades do. If you make more they take more out and you only come out slightly ahead. You have to make much, much, much more than you are now in order to break through that child support deducted vs take home. Make sense? Probably not since I am explaining it! So lets give an example!

*BTW this is by no means accurate its just an example
Say you make 1600$ a month? They order you to pay 500$ a month in child support. So you minus your child support payment, then your taxes, then your health care costs, etc. Your left with 6-700$ to pay rent, car payment, bills, food, etc.

Now lets say you get a 400$ a month raise!(woohoo!!! dream on big buddy) Most child support systems do a review every 3 years to modify child support. So when that review comes up you will end up paying more. So your review comes up and they see you are now making 2000$ a month. They raise your child support payment to 600-750$ now. Granted overall you should have an extra couple hundred a month right? WRONG Remember if your making around that much money your still in that spot that if you make more they just take it in taxes.

So thats a crude example of what I am talking about. The reason that I am talking about this in the first place is because the system is broken! I can’t afford to go see my children. Instead of having a father figure they have no one. My kids get punished every morning by this system. They get to wake up everyday without a father. It creates a financial stress with both parents. “I cant afford gas to go see them” “When is child support going to come through” “I cant plan financially when Health and Welfare aren’t consistent with giving me child support”

See thats just what we need. More stress in our lives! Instead of creating an environment that stimulates the parent to spend time with their kids they do just the opposite. How about a monthly allowance that they lower the child support payments so I can afford a car or gas and go pick up my kids. Oh, but wait, then the other parent doesn’t get as much money?! Oh NO! Someone else(the other parent) is watching the kid/s. That means less daycare, less money on food, diapers, etc for that one parent.

I have my issues with the current Health and Welfare system as do many others. I think their money would be better spent regulating and pursuing dead beat parents(fathers AND mothers) rather than the ones that are more than willing to do what it takes to take care of their child. Maybe I’m just unhappy about the whole situation that I happen to be in since every parents situation is different.

Just the other day I went over to my childs mothers house to watch him and his brother while mom went out for her mothers birthday. Keep in mind that my car broke down and was fortunate enough to be able to catch a ride with her sister else I wouldn’t of been able to go see my kids. Now on with this little tale :P It was a pretty typical time with them. Play, entertain, eat, baths, and bed. It was a very wonderful time. When their mother and aunt got home I drove their aunt home since they had been drinking. I called the next morning to make sure everything went okay with the kids. I could hear in the background my oldest asking for daddy and pointing at the bed. I was so disappointed in myself for not being there for my child. My child should never have to wake up and wonder,”why cant dad be here”.

I would do anything in this world to be able to be there for my child every morning. This isnt really about me or my disappointments but about my sons. They get to grow up without a father. Partly, their parents fault, and partly the systems fault for the way it treats us. I know and realize it is about the children. They deserve both parents everyday. I will do everything humanly possible to accomplish that. My children need me, want me, and I them.

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Life, Lawyers, and Hospital BILLS

June 28, 2008

¡aló!,

This will most likely end up as a ramble post. So deal, YO

LAWYERS n’ Stuff
I am still dealing with all the lawyer stuff. We seem to be stuck on this one point that revolves around a piece of paper that they claim they don’t have. I have the paper and have faxed it to them twice. Both times I got a “Fax Confirmation” saying it was sent/received. I’m not sure how many weeks went by since the first one was sent but I called to check the status on the case. They informed me they were still waiting to get a copy of my paper. I informed them of when it was faxed and had even told them on the phone that it would be faxed on such and such date/time. Not once did they bother to call and say hey where is the paper we didn’t get it. So I ended up faxing it to them again about a week ago. I still need to call them and find out if they have received it or not.

Now, on to some good news regarding all of this lawyer, H&W, and tax stuff. I got my Federal Tax Return. Somehow, they didn’t take it like they did my last one. Why? I have no idea and I’m not going to question it because I desperately needed the money. I promptly paid off nearly all of my bills and got the remaining things I needed for my house.(Big TV and a PS3 was needed so shut up) and holy fuck there was just a spider crawling on my stomach…. asldkfja;kdhfaoeihfak ugh… anyways. … dammit gross… ok really as I was saying. It helped me catch up really really quick. Something that would of probably taken me another 2 years to catch up on. Now, instead of paying out more than I make I pay out nearly exactly what I make. Yippy

HOSPITAL BILLS
Now that we had some good news we can have some bad news. I was recently in the hospital for several things. One of which was a good case of Pneumonia. The other was just everything else coming to head at once. Stress, a flu, depression, work exhaustion and burnout etc. It put me in the hospital for 3 days and pretty much put me in bed for two weeks.(even though I tried to stay out of bed for most of it) During those two weeks I ended up going back due to me not “taking it easy” and for several follow up visits and what seemed to me was an endless amount of blood tests. The really nice thing about all this is that I had just recently paid off most my debt and now I can replace it with medical bills. Yay!

LIFE
I’ve been thinking for days about how to write this. Not really for your benefit but for mine. I find once I am able to put things in to words that adequately describe the situation that I then feel at peace with whatever it is. That’s not to say that it is always a lasting peace though.

People say that life is short and in this day and age people act like they have 4 years to live. Always rushing through everything and usually never taking the time to stop and think about things; especially their actions. The whole part about actions has bit me in the proverbial butt pretty damn hard. In fact it has changed my entire life.

There was once a situation where I needed to sloooow down, stop, and think about what was going on. In this situation I didn’t until half way through. But, by then the other party went down the same road I did. They stopped thinking and started reacting. Polar opposites at exactly the wrong times for both of us. Needless to say this argument and some claim as an altercation cost me nearly everything.

I nearly lost my job and my sons. I lost most of my friends(ok lets be honest I didn’t have any but people lost respect for me regardless if I was guilty or not) The worse part of this entire situation(from my standpoint) is that my sons miss out on having a father. Not only that I think I have finally lost the one woman that I truly love. Despite all the things that have transpired between us it still crushes my world to know that she no longer wants me in her world. Yes, yes, we have kids and we will always know each other because of this fact but sometimes that makes it even more painful for me. Sooner or later she will get lonely or will just happen to find someone she likes.(maybe hell will freeze over and she will take me back?)

Ramble, ramble, ramble… anyways all of this because of one thing. Granted maybe it was building or transpiring over an extended amount of time. Either way it was one thing. My “inability” to stop and think. I’ve done a lot to change that. In fact there are times now that I am even too passive and it creates conflict. I’m positive that it will get balanced out with time. I know that I will remain hopeful for a great many years to come; that one day I will be able to be a full time dad to my children and a full time husband to the woman that I love.

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The wonderful world of lawyers and local government!

April 23, 2008

It’s an interesting thing! It turns out that the saying, “Never trust a lawyer” just so happens to be true!! My lawyer, who is a very nice guy, has been working on a case for me for the last 2-3 months now; at least thats what I thought. It turns out there has been no work and no progress made on my case ever since it was presented to him. I have talked to him several times and he has told me several times that all that needs to be done is get some papers signed and its done. I’ve called many many times, left messages, etc with no result. The reason is because nothing has been done with it!

It turns out that all my lawyer does is turn in the paper work and someone else does all the work. I was able to speak to the woman that does all the work yesterday. She advised me that she didn’t know what needed to be done on the case because she didn’t understand it. So I went through everything with her that I had gone through with my lawyer. She now understands it and said she would get everything drawn up within the next day and should be able to fax it off to me tomorrow. If I would have only known this is the person I had to talk to I would have done this from the start!!!

The thing is until this is done I can’t do my taxes. Well, I can but I will then have another battle to get what is really mine. I guess I’ll start with the whole story so everyone knows where this is coming from. Part of it stems from my inexperience in dealing with legal matters and the other part deals with crooked government agencies.

The gist of the story is that when my son was born the hospital charged Medicaid twice for the birth. The actual birth part costs $1480.00. I was there so I am positive that two babies were not born. They ended up charging $2960.00. The hospital nor Medicaid caught this error. From there Medicaid passed the bill to Health and Welfare who sued me for the costs. 68% of all the medical costs to be exact. They totaled the costs at $5880.00. So do a little math and take 68% of that and thats what they sued me for.

I figured I would just call up the hospital and get a revised bill and submit that to Medicaid who would in turn deal with H&W. The hospital did the revised bill pretty quickly and said they sent the corrected bill onto Medicaid and H&W. I called H&W, who by the way will treat you like the scum of the earth if you have testicles, advised they would do nothing with it unless they had a court order saying they had to do it. So that’s where this whole legal thing started. To get a court order to get them to correct it.

Along with suing me for the medical costs they also garnish my wages and take my tax returns.(They also placed a lien on my properties) So if I do my tax return now it will pay off what they feel I owe. I want to get the correct amount paid so that way I get more money back. Now, if I do my taxes and pay it off I then still have to go through the court for a court order to get them to refund my money. So it just adds another layer on it if I do my taxes now: Court order, deal with H&W to get my money back.

An interesting thing about this whole process I have learned A lot about how medical billing and how fucked up H&W really is. When I went through all the paper work I found out that they didn’t arrive at the $5880.00 number with just health costs. It turns out there is also a $330.00 court fee(attorney fee) tacked in there. So really the health costs should be: ($5880.00-$330.00-$1480.00)*68% = $2767.60 That’s about $1200 less than what they sued me for.

Now we dig a little further into this and notice something interesting. Every month I get a statement from H&W stating the following: Current Monthly Child Support, Medical Costs(Birthing expenses), Back Child Support(if any), and Legal Fees. According to the Court document I am only supposed to be charged $330.00. The Legal Fees in the H&W statement shows I owe $330.00. Thats interesting because they already tacked that $330.00 into the health costs. So really I am being charged a legal fee of $660.00. Personally I really doubt this is a mistake and is more a general attitude that if I am not married to the mother that I am a low life piece of scum. I have no problem paying what it actually cost for my son to be born nor do I have any problem paying child support because my child needs all the support he can get.

IMHO, it’s really a stupid situation that could have been avoided if I had prior Medical billing training! Or perhaps H&W could use a little common sense and deal with things like normal people do. It really pisses me off that in order for anything to really get done these days it takes a court to get it done. I’m not some scumbag deadbeat dad that doesn’t want to pay. I want to pay what I am suppose to pay and I want to be involved with my son in every way possible. H&W is just too messed up to see these things anymore. Too much red tape and too many apathetic workers. I’m sure there are some good workers there but they are prevented from being good workers from all the red tape. Really it’s way more complicated than it needs to be.

Well, I guess I will find out in the next few days where this goes. I’m pretty pissed off about it and will hound my lawyers office until this gets done. If I have too I guess I will get another lawyer to deal my lawyer so that they can deal with H&W’s lawyers! I’ll post an update in the coming weeks if anything actually gets done or if I have bust some kneecaps to get it done.

Someone please get me a rum and coke :(

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Crapola!!!!

April 17, 2008

Well MY laptop is officially dead. At first I thought it was a video card problem.(It has integrated video). There were reports on the net that there was a possible design flaw that would cause the GPU to come loose causing no boot problems. That seemed to be the cause because I was getting one long beep and two short beeps at boot. So that meant it could be the system board, memory(DIMM), or the graphics card.

Now that I found the problem I began to troubleshoot. I had three possibilities and I really needed to narrow it down because there is no way I can replace everything. I swapped memory and still had the same problem. I took the system board and checked everything on the board. It turned out there was a small mini-crack right around the GPU where the soldering points had broken. The pins were busted so it just isn’t a matter of re-soldering the chip.(even that probably wouldn’t work) I bent the system board just a little bit to see how far it had to be bent to get the pins to stay in contact and put a piece of plastic in a safe spot to keep it bent that way.

I put everything back together and started up the laptop. The most wondrous of miracles happened! It started up. Once I was on the desktop I started to move things to another computer. Of course I had to bump the laptop in the process and kill it again. After several restarts I ended up tearing it back down and resetting the plastic piece. I was able to start up and transfer all of my stuff to another computer and just in time too. The system is nearly completely dead. I do get POST beeps but that is all. Just two short beeps with no error message and a bios screen. That means it is the system board that is dying/dead.

Now knowing what part needed to be replaced I went to the wonderful site of LENOVO. Found the replacement part number and found the price….. $490.00!!!!!!!!!!!! This laptop is several years old. So I decided to try EBAY. I figured someone would have something cheap. Holy crap was I wrong! The prices range from: $290-$800. Google products search didn’t have anything better. Which completely sucks and bites ass. If anyone wants to go to my wishlist and buy that laptop for me I would be grateful! (OK maybe not that one but I do have another LENOVO in mind)

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